Your New Best Friend - The latest in PALs

By Julie Bos

It’s true: the industry’s hottest new lenses are out, and they’re offering the latest in design and technology innovations. To help ensure your lab remains up-to-date on the PAL breakthroughs, we’ve assembled the major announcements from a variety of lens companies — all in one place. Check out the following lineup, and plan to share the good news with your ECP customers. You’ll both reap the benefits.

Carl Zeiss Vision

GT2, the new flagship progressive lens from ZEISS, is the culmination of the ZEISS design approach. GT2 combines point-by-point optimization of the lens for maximum clarity with a new understanding of the lens’s interaction with the physiology of the wearer. The result is a lens that’s uniquely suited to the wearer’s natural eye movements, with an optimized corridor, a 17mm fitting height, and a near zone tailored to the eye rotation most people prefer for reading.

Essilor

Both Varilux Physio and Varilux Physio 360° lenses are general-purpose progressives that offer improved vision in all fields because of W.A.V.E. Technology: Wavefront Advanced Vision Enhancement. Distortions are reduced so the retina receives a sharper image, thus improving distance vision and contrast sensitivity. The intermediate field is 30 percent wider than traditional progressives. Wearers of the lenses will also notice improved acuity even in low light, increased contrast, and deeper colors.
Varilux Ipseo lenses are designed based on the wearer’s natural, unique physiological criteria plus prescription parameters. A wearer’s head and eye movement are measured using Essilor’s VisionPrint System (VPS) and are incorporated into the final design of the lenses.
DEFINITY PALs provide the least amount of peripheral distortion with wide fields-of-view through the use of proprietary digital surfacing design and production processes. DEFINITY uses DUAL ADD Technology to reduce unwanted astigmatism by dividing and offsetting the add and unwanted astigmatism between the front and back surfaces of the lens. DEFINITY also features the GROUND VIEW ADVANTAGE, a gradual decrease in add power below the near zone, which minimizes distortion for a flattened, more natural field of vision. The result: clearer vision when patients look down.

HOYA

Hoyalux iD is the world’s first Integrated Double Surface Progressive lens design. This design concept splits the functionality and performance of the front and back surfaces by placing vertical and horizontal progressive powers on completely separate lens surfaces. Using HOYA digital surfacing technology, the horizontal progressive components are surfaced on the back surface. The benefit of this placement is that it offers the wearer wider fields of view in the near zone and virtually eliminates swimming and swaying sensations.

Conversely, the vertical progressive components are surfaced on the front side of the lens. The benefit of this placement is that it shortens the eye rotation between distance and near viewing by placing it farther from the eye. In order to provide more flexibility and choice for the wearer and eye care professional, Hoyalux iD can be customized to fit a frame with a minimum fitting height as low as 14mm.

Hoyalux iD LifeStyle is the next step in the Hoyalux iD design family, making Hoya digital technology available to an even broader audience. Hoyalux iD LifeStyle’s Rotation Angle Based Design offers a smooth and natural transition between all visual zones by precisely mapping each point on the lens in reference to the eye rotation. It is available in three lens materials: HOYA Hilux 1.50, HOYA Phoenix and HOYA Eynoa 1.67. Hoyalux iD Lifestyle is also available in a short-corridor option, Hoyalux iD LifeStyle CD, with a minimum fitting height of 14mm.

Seiko

Seiko’s Succeed Internal Free-Form™ PALs place the patient’s entire Rx onto the back surface of the lens, leaving the front surface a perfect sphere, which eliminates front surface distortion. The fields of view are also significantly expanded, since the corrective surface is closer to the eye.

Succeed lenses are custom made to each patient’s exact prescription, with millions of exact Rx combinations. Aspheric compensation provides total management of off-center astigmatism and power error, giving the patient a multi-focal lens that feels like a single-vision lens.

Freeform Optics, the technology that made Creation the 2006 OLA Best in Lens Design Winner, is now available with Shamir Piccolo, and will soon be available with Shamir Office and Shamir Attitude.

While traditional semi-finished PALs are produced using ceramic molds, Freeform Optics produces lenses with digital molds, yielding highly advanced progressive lenses with six times more resolution. Utilizing Freeform Optics, Shamir engineers are able to transfer the lens design with the highest level of optical accuracy. Shamir Piccolo is the newest PAL to be upgraded, which is currently shipping with Freeform Optics.

Signet Armorlite

Signet Armorlite continues its progressive lens innovations with the expanded offerings of KODAK Unique Progressive Lens and the introduction of KODAK Precise Short Progressive Lens.

With expanded availability in 27 lens materials, KODAK Unique Progressive is the first progressive design to optimize visual performance for frame size and shape. Available June 2007, KODAK Precise Short Progressive contains the shortest corridor of 13mm and uses the breakthrough technology of Vision First Design. KODAK Precise Short has a fitting height of 13mm to 19mm to accommodate small frames and is available in five materials. Learn more about these lenses at www.signetarmorlite.com.

SOLA

At 13mm, Compact ULTRA delivers the lowest minimum fitting height of any leading short corridor progressive lens.* Better yet, Compact ULTRA’s patented design and revolutionary corridor design deliver unsurpassed reading vision in small and ultra-small frames, with lower peak astigmatism than other short-corridor progressive lenses. With Compact ULTRA, presbyopes can choose the small fashion frames they want without sacrificing the outstanding vision they need.
*Surfaced from semi-finished.

Vision-Ease

Vision-Ease Lens recently announced a licensing and distribution agreement with Optixx, a progressive lens company based in Switzerland. With the portfolio of progressive designs from Optixx, Vision-Ease Lens is now able to offer new traditionally surfaced progressive lenses and direct-surfaced progressives to its customers.

The direct-surfaced progressive is optimized for the wearer through the availability of nine different design options. Design options include the Office with a large near zone, Standard with an optimum balance between near and far and Outdoor with a large far vision. Each of these designs is available in three different fitting heights.

Younger Optics

IMAGE is now available in DriveWear, the most exciting release in our industry in years. This award-winning progressive has been rated favorably among recent independent studies. This is due in part because IMAGE boasts one of the widest distortion free distance zones in the industry, a key advantage for the driving task. From the dashboard to the road ahead, IMAGE provides excellent viewing at near, far and intermediate distances, and can accommodate Rx ranges of -8D to +6D, with 1.00 – 3.00 add powers.

Plus, Drivewear lenses uniquely combine two of the most advanced technologies found in the eyeglass industry today: Transitions Photochromic Technology and NuPolar polarization.